First published in North America as:
Drage, Charles, The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, June 1954.
Reviewed 12 June 1954:
This book features the lusty encounters of Morris Abraham (Two-Gun) Cohen, sometime Sergeant in the Canadian Expeditionary Force of World War 1, and later general in the Chinese Army. For Morris Abraham Cohen, a bad start became a lucky break. If he hadn’t been a street urchin in London, he would never have gone to the school maintained by the Jewish Board of Guardians, where he encountered fresh air, sound exercise and the inspiring tutelage of head master Israel Ellis. He migrated to Canada, got in the real estate business, and made friends with the Chinese community. During 1910, Dr Sun Yat Sen was touring Canada to gain support for the Chinese revolution which overthrew the Manchu dynasty, and Cohen got taken along as bodyguard. After the interlude of the Great War, he was persuaded to go out to China as ADC to Dr Sun, later becoming confidential negotiator, adviser on foreign purchases, a bank official under T.V. Soong, and arms buyer. Morris Abraham Cohen became a figure in China for the best part of two decades. Often in danger, dogged by rumor, he gave his allegiance to the leaders he admired. In late 1941 he was caught in Hong Kong and interned. The Japanese beat him severely, to try to extract information about his Chinese friends whom they wanted to lay hands on. Finally he was released, as a Canadian, in the exchange of civilian internees who came back in the ‘Gripsholm’. Cohen’s life, told by Commander Drage who became acquainted with him in the Far East, makes very robust and amusing reading. His is an engaging memoir of a man of action.
Comments
Maj. Gen. M.A. "Two-Gun" Cohen
1954 - Drage, Charles, The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, June 1954
Publisher’s introduction: “A no-holds-barred account of a remarkable life told in the words of the man who had the humor and courage to live it. Once in a long while there is a book that has the wonderful capacity of introducing the reader to a really unique personality. The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen is an opportunity to meet one of the most attractive and extraordinary human beings ever presented in a book. Its subject has never lost his relish for life, his engaging honesty, his industrious self-reliance, or his infinite capacity for friendship and loyalty. Two world wars and a vast amount of experience have failed to slow him down. General Cohen has had a remarkable career in China, where at one time he was aide and bodyguard to the great Dr Sun Yat-sen. This book tells his personal story of what those times were like, up to and including his detention in a Japanese concentration camp after the fall of Hong Kong. In gusto, sheer verve, and outright human vitality this is a life neither its subject nor its readers would wish to miss. Commander Charles Drage, who has succeeded in getting General Cohen’s story down in vivid and unbowdlerized terms, has spent most of his life in British naval intelligence (and later with MI6). It was one of his tours of duty in the Far East, during the December 1923 Canton Customs Crisis, that he first came across General Cohen.” Commander Drage recalls this first meeting: We first met during the Canton Customs Crisis of Christmas 1923 when I was First Lieutenant of H.M.S. “Bluebell”. Morris Cohen was then a romantic and mysterious but somewhat equivocal figure in the service of the great revolutionary figure, Dr Sun Yat-sen. We found ourselves in opposing camps, relations between which were severely strained, and our acquaintance had little chance of developing. The foreign powers were deeply concerned and a numerous international flotilla assembled off the city. Dr Sun remained unmoved by this show of force and provisionally appointed Cohen as his Commissioner of Customs.